motivation: it's the guilt and the fear
by johnisdonne
Summary: a delve into delphine's thoughts after cosima leaves to get eskimo pies and her motivations and past history with leekie. "i cry after sex with boys, too" 1x08 past delphine/leekie and delphine/others


_324B21_.

How could a tag, an experiment title, suddenly mean so much to her? It's natural to feel attached to something one thinks of as theirs - she had been the one to be assigned to Cosima's 'case', even before she was sent out as a monitor, so she did consider her _hers_ as much as the opposite was true - but this was something else.

A simple ploy to get closer became a passion that engulfed her, inflamed every aspect of her being. She had thought she was ready for this idea of a person to become tangible, but the reality of whom she had viewed as a mere science experiment was nothing she expected. She had given her something she hadn't dreamed to find - a feeling of love and all the problems that came with it.

She cried after, after she and Cosima had tried to study but only found themselves in bed and down to undergarments in the blink of an eye, passion filling sheets instead of bruising hips against the unyielding wood of her desk. She finally understood what it meant to feel guilty - all those times she had used her guile to seduce a man to further her position in life seemed unimportant to the feeling that overwhelmed her now. Here she was, sent by Leekie to watch, to essentially be a spy untrained in espionage, and the subject had given herself to her so completely, without hesitation, with the trust and passion of the ignorant. She was terrified what it would mean when she found out - and that was an inevitability; Cosima was far too intelligent to be fooled for long.

And yet, she had been truthful with Cosima in just about everything. She was currently a teacher's assistant (even if it was truly just a job she was assigned by Leekie as an excuse to be there); she smoked but had never attempted marijuana; she cried when she had sex with boys, too. (God, had she ever not worked her tear glands post coitus?) But, at the same time, she had lied. Lied out of desperation, out of hope and need. She had lied about Aldous Leekie and her relationship with him, her last name had been a lie. She couldn't hate her lies because without them she never would have connected with Cosima, and when she lied she could believe the false truths. With her new last name, she'd never had a relationship with Leekie, and that made her feel happier than she could imagine.

Although she was passionate about her work and loved working at such a prestigious place as the Dyad Institute, part of her wished she had never met the founder of neolution. She applied time after time to such places after she had graduated from medical school until she had stumbled upon an article about the ill fated place. After that, she had been obsessed. She went to as many of his seminars as she could until she took up the courage to speak to him. She was taken right away; Cosima was right: his mind was very sexy. He was enigmatic and she was young, desperate, headstrong, and had been told all of her life that her body was better than her brains in any situation she found herself in.

In the end, she got the job, but also found herself in a bed that constantly changed scents - she knew that she wasn't the only person with whom he had shared himself, and it hurt as he rolled over after to get dressed and apply cologne. She only cried after he left or after he kicked her out. And yet she still came back, time after time, intoxicated by him and the way he made her feel powerful, fearing that if she stopped so did her job.

She tried not to care. She took men into her own bed, but still cried as their lack of meaning set in. They were replacements - for Leekie, for true companionship. They meant nothing, just a blur of faces that never stayed the same. The showers she took after forcing them to leave were always scalding enough to turn her skin red, the only noises being the water hitting the ground and her forcing out names of random diseases in alphabetical order around sobs.

But she wouldn't trade Cosima for any of that to have never happened. Cosima was worth every pitiful encounter she'd have, every time she gave herself over to her unhealthy habits and slept with a man numerous years her senior, every time she'd been approached just for her body and complied because that's all she felt good for. Cosima had found the same result - they had ended up in bed together, kissed, came together in such a way that neither could properly speak passed _yes, more, oh god, fuck, Cosima, Delphine_ and unintelligible moans - but it appeared in such a way that she felt loved for the first time, not used.

It made it worse. Instead of being the used, she felt like the user. She had an ulterior motive that Cosima was oblivious to, one that would destroy everything they built. She feared for the day it would come to light.

But until that day, she decided, she will ignore her guilt - her genuine feelings - and do as she is told. She fears Leekie as much as she once craved him and as she covets Cosima now.


End file.
